HealthPlex already seeing about 60 patients each day

The Lenox Hill HealthPlex’s emergency department has now been open for two weeks on the building’s ground floor. In the near future, the $150 million facility will also be offering healthcare services on its upper floors, including imaging services and orthopedic surgery. Photo by Tequila Minsky

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | The Lenox Hill HealthPlex has been busy since opening two weeks ago, having already treated hundreds of patients.

Among the more serious cases the new healthcare facility, at 30 Seventh Ave., has dealt with include a diner who suffered a severe allergic reaction to nuts, and a 97-year-old Village woman who fell at home, fractured her skull and had bleeding in her brain.

The freestanding emergency department has also already transported more than three dozen patients by ambulance to area hospitals for higher-level care — but this percentage actually has been lower than predicted.

Speaking around 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Alex Hellinger, the new West Village healthcare facility’s executive director, said the total number of patients the facility had seen so far was 600, with an average of from 50 to 60 per day. All the individuals were treated within minutes of entering the HealthPlex, which has 26 patient rooms.

“It’s steadily picking up,” Hellinger said of the patient volume. “It’s been going fantastic. I’ve been checking in with the patients who are here, and haven’t gotten a negative comment. People are very pleased.”

As of that time, there had been a total of 39 patients — including the 97-year-old woman — who had needed to be transported from the Village E.D. to hospitals. Thirty of these were admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital, on the Upper East Side, which, like the HealthPlex, is part of the North Shore-LIJ Health System. Nine other patients were sent to other area hospitals, such as Beth Israel, N.Y.U. Langone, Bellevue or Cornell.

According to Dr. Eric Cruzen, the HealthPlex’s director of emergency medicine, the patients who needed to be transported had conditions ranging from fractures that required surgery, congestive heart failure, faintness and psychological issues to appendicitis (a patient needed his or her appendix taken out) and other abdominal problems.

All these patients were transported by the two NS-LIJ ambulances that the HealthPlex has on hand in its ambulance bay on W. 12th St.

“Transports have run smoothly and quickly,” Cruzen said.

However, the total number of individuals who have needed to be transported has been lower than the 10 percent that was anticipated.

Noting that they are tracking this figure very carefully, Cruzen said it stood at 6.37 percent on Tuesday as he was speaking around 4 p.m.

(In between the time Hellinger spoke to The Villager and Cruzen spoke to the paper separately a bit later, the total number of patients the place had seen had jumped to 612.)

As for the mix of patients they’ve been getting, Hellinger and Cruzen said, it’s been all over the place in terms of age, but only 5 percent have been pediatric patients, under age 18. The most serious pediatric case involved a teen who stepped in a hole and displaced a bone in his foot.

Other conditions the HealthPlex has treated include seizures and shortness of breath, such as by people who were climbing up subway stairs.

A few people have come in for psychological conditions, such as depression, and were seen by the on-site social worker/case manager and released. They might have been given outpatient referrals or had their medication adjusted, Cruzen said.

Charles Mozdir, the fugitive sex offender gunned down by officers Monday at a Village smoke shop, was also brought to the HealthPlex.

“What I was told is that they’d bring him to the nearest emergency center,” Hellinger said. “He was unresponsive, and they were working on him before they brought him here. He had multiple, multiple gunshot wounds.”

Meanwhile, the three officers who were wounded in the gun battle — including a detective shot in the abdomen — were taken to Bellevue.

On its first day, the HealthPlex had 30 patients, but now they’re regularly seeing around 60 per day. The heaviest volume was Sat., July 26, when they had 66 patients, which is just a couple of patients shy of their “steady state expectation” of 68 per day — the number they project they’ll be seeing once the place hits its stride.

Cruzen said it’s to be expected that weekends have the heaviest patient volume, since the Village is a destination neighborhood known for its entertainment, bars and restaurants.

“The weekends are busier,” he said. “It’s people who were putting off coming in. Also, you get the partiers. There are more people in the Village recreating.”

The HealthPlex has treated a number of individuals for intoxication, including a homeless person, but also wealthy individuals who were on a night out on the town, Cruzen noted.

“Substance abuse does not discriminate based on socioeconomic status,” he noted.

As for whether the woozy walk-ins are coming from the Meatpacking District or other Village-area watering holes, Cruzen said, “We don’t ask, but the consensus is that they’re coming from bars and clubs.”

Hellinger said ambulances that have dropped off patients at the HealthPlex have been from the Fire Department and E.M.S., Hatzolah and also neighboring hospitals.

As of midafternoon Tuesday, the new freestanding emergency department had already dealt with three patients who ranked as 1’s on the E.S.I., or “emergency severity index,” of 1 through 5, as well 81 patients that rated as 2’s.

One of the Level 1’s was a man in his 60s who was very sick with a sepsis infection, Cruzen said. They resuscitated him and sent him up to Lenox Hill Hospital. The elderly woman who hit her head also rated a 1 on the E.S.I. index.

To date, the HealthPlex had not dealt with any heart attacks, strokes or major trauma. In the event of those kind of cases, they would stabilize and treat the patients, then transport them to nearby hospitals.

Hellinger said many West Village residents have been very flattering in their comments about the facility, the staff and the place’s capabilities.

This praise has both been expressed verbally and in e-mails from patients after leaving the HealthPlex.

“We had one gentleman who said he was here when this was built,” Hellinger said of the HealthPlex’s iconic ship-shaped building. “He had a fractured arm. He was just really glowing [about the HealthPlex] in his conversation. He got a splint.”

Formerly the St. Vincent’s Hospital O’Toole Building, the HealthPlex’s home was originally built as a maritime union headquarters.

In an e-mail to Cruzen, the elderly skull-fracture patient said of the treatment she received, “If I could enter my review on Yelp, I would enter a five-star review.”

As for the man who suffered an anaphylactic reaction, he had been dining at one of the city’s finest restaurants, in the Flatiron District, when the tree-nut allergy suddenly struck him. His tongue swelled up and he could hardly speak or breathe.

As the man’s wife later explained in an e-mail to HealthPlex P.R. rep Barbara Osborn, due to the allergic reaction’s severity — it was the worst one her husband had ever had — they didn’t want to call an ambulance and have to wait for it to arrive, but they did know about the new HealthPlex.

As the wife put it in her e-mail, “If I had to wonder where to go or had to call 911, it might have been a terrible night.”

Instead, they got in their car, and with the woman at the wheel, quickly drove over to the HealthPlex.

The man was quickly given intravenous drugs to alleviate the allergic reaction.

The new facility also has top equipment, including a CAT scan machine, Hellinger and Cruzen noted. And the HealthPlex can administer 780 types of medicine.

The loss of St. Vincent’s, a full-service hospital, with inpatient beds, is still being felt deeply in the community. But Hellinger and Cruzen both said that, in one way, having a stand-alone E.D. does have an advantage, in that, in most cases, it will mean faster treatment, because there won’t be any competition with an attached hospital for X-rays and CAT scans or lab test results.

“Usually the biggest delay in E.D.’s is waiting for results, if there are beds upstairs,” Hellinger noted.

A recent article in The New York Times noted, somewhat cynically, that the Village HealthPlex and other new freestanding E.D.’s have another role — as feeders for private hospitals that want to fill their beds, exploiting the voids left as other neighborhood hospitals have closed. And, in the HealthPlex’s case, it’s true that most of the patients needing to be transported are going to Lenox Hill Hospital.

The Times article also noted that the well-equipped W. 12th St. HealthPlex apparently hopes to attract more affluent local patients, the kind that avoided St. Vincent’s.

Nevertheless, the HealthPlex accepts all patients, regardless of ability to pay, unlike urgent-care centers, which are now charging $50 simply for a standard visit.

Over all, though, Cruzen, like Hellinger, noted he’s basically been getting very positive feedback from the HealthPlex’s patients.

“A lot of people echoed the same thing that we are hearing,” Cruzen said, “that it’s really filling the void that was left by St. Vincent’s — that there’s somewhere they can go for lifesaving care. This is right across the street from them — it’s a game-changer.”

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